Exploiting Pitch Accent Information in Compound Processing: A Comparison between Adults and 6- to 7-Year-Old Children.

ABSTRACTA noun can be potentially ambiguous as to whether it is a head on its own, or is a modifier of a Noun + Noun compound waiting for its head. This study investigates whether young children can exploit the prosodic information on a modifier constituent preceding the head to facilitate resolution of such ambiguity in Japanese. Evidence from English suggests that young speakers are not sensitive to compound stress in distinguishing between compounds and syntactic phrases unless the compound is very familiar (Good, 2008; Vogel & Raimy, 2002). This study concerns whether children in general have such limited capability to use prosodic cues to promptly compute a compound representation without the lexical boost, or whether they might show greater sensitivity to more categorical compound prosody such as that associated with the Compound Accent Rule (CAR) in Japanese. A previous study (Hirose & Mazuka, 2015) demonstrated that adult Japanese speakers can predict the compound structure prior to the head if th...